Hobbit director Peter Jackson on quest to bring First World War to life

Grainy World War One footage has been updated in colour for Peter Jackson’s documentary

It is the First World War, but not as we know it: not just in colour, but 3D too.

For 100 years our collective memory of troops fighting on the Western Front has been fed by grainy, flickering images that seem to exist only in some distant, far-off age.

Now the filmmaker Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has breathed new life into those pictures by creating a high-definition, colourised, 3D film of the war.

Peter Jackson ­has restored archive footage and audio interviews with veterans recorded in the 1960s, 70s and 80s

He has used digital technology to restore archive footage a century old from the Imperial War Museum for a film that will have its premiere as part of the BFI London Film Festival this year. The film will also be broadcast on BBC One and shown…